Don’t struggle with spinach – grow chard
 (Read 250+ times)
By Emma Cooper
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Even the most experienced vegetable growers sometimes struggle with spinach. It’s a very fussy plant, demanding the best possible conditions and even then running to seed at the drop of a hat. Forget about transplanting your spinach, or nursing it through a dry season, or just forget spinach entirely and try one of the other leafy plants that are just as good to eat and easier to grow.
Chard is a large plant, popular in cottage gardens and vegetable gardens that are on show because it grows large and glossy green leaves on colored stems. You can get everything from white through yellow and pink to dark red – and when the sun shines through the chard stems there are very few plants that can match them for visual appeal. They’re easy to grow, too. Chard is a member of the beetroot family, germinates easily, grows strongly and is bothered by very few pests – seedlings will need slug protection, but other than that they’re usually healthy and happy. You can harvest leaves through a long period, too. Spring sowings will crop all summer and late summer sowings will stand through the winter and then try to flower in spring.
Chard leaves and stems are both edible, but need to be cooked separately because the stems need a longer cooking time. Some people find the flavour a little strong, but if you’re one of them then you need to try chard’s baby brother – leaf beet. Leaf beet is a much smaller plant, growing in clumps rather than reaching for the skies. It’s plain green, with smaller leaves and delicate stems, but just as hardy and easy to grow and with a milder flavour. Young leaf beet leaves (also called perpetual spinach or spinach beet) can be eaten raw in salads. Older ones are great in stir-fries or wherever you would use spinach.
Leaf beet is occasionally bothered by leaf miners, who live within the leaves and eat see-through trails through them. If only one or two leaves are affected then just pick them off and put them on the compost heap. If the plant is badly affected then cut it right back to just short stems. The plant will survive the harsh treatment (although you might want to give it a liquid feed to say sorry!) but by the time it sprouts new leaves the leaf miners are likely to have moved on.
There are plenty of other leafy vegetables you could try growing, but if you’re looking for a garden staple then you can do a lot worse than chard and leaf beet. With their long season and ease of cultivation, they deserve a spot in kitchen gardens everywhere.
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Author Bio Box: Emma Cooper
Emma Cooper is the author of Growing Vegetables is Fun. She also has a weekly gardening podcast, The Alternative Kitchen Garden, all about growing your own food in an environmentally friendly way. Check out her website for her gardening blog and more articles.
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